Pope Benedict XVI will resign on Feb. 28, citing his deteriorating strength, making him the first pontiff to step down in almost 600 years.

In a statement on Vatican Radio's website Monday, the 85-year-old Pope said his health is the reason for the surprise announcement.

"After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry," the Pope said.

Benedict said his strength, over the last few months, "has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me."

The head of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics, Benedict said he was "well aware of the seriousness of this act."

Victims' complaint to the international criminal court accuses Pope Benedict and three others of failing to prevent abusers

Victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests have accused the pope, the Vatican secretary of state and two other high-ranking Holy See officials of crimes against humanity, in a formal complaint to the international criminal court (ICC).

The submission, lodged at The Hague on Tuesday, accuses the four men not only of failing to prevent or punish perpetrators of rape and sexual violence but also of engaging in the "systematic and widespread" practice of concealing sexual crimes around the world.

It includes individual cases of abuse where letters and documents between Vatican officials and others show a refusal to co-operate with law enforcement agencies seeking to pursue suspects, according to the Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a US-based organisation that represents the claimants.

Pam Spees, human rights attorney with CCR, said: "The point of this is to look at it from a higher altitude. You zoom out and the practices are identical: whistleblowers are punished, the refusal of the Vatican to co-operate with law enforcement agencies. You see the protection of priests and leaving them in the ministry and because of these decisions other children are raped and sexually assaulted."

There's huge cultural confusion in the West about homosexuality. On the one hand, the acts themselves are being 'mainstreamed', ie being made acceptable and even fashionable in the mainstream of society. They are not illegal. In fact, in many western countries, homosexuals have extra protections bullt into the law. Sexual education in schools teaches that homosexuality is merely another gender, just like the other two or three, and that homosexuals have suffered a long history of abuse, just like black people.

Yet, hiding and protecting active homosexuals from public disclosure is not OK. Not for the Church, and not if the perps are priests.

Apparently covering up the participants in legal but immoral sexual activities is illegal.

Why? Because it somehow violates the human rights of the kids to wring huge cash settlements out of the Church. This, despite the fact that most of the victims are boys, who nobody much cares about these days.

The natural revulsion that many boys feel towards homosexuality has even been medicalized and categorized as a mental disease called homophobia.

What is 'right' and what is 'wrong' in this quagmire?

At a minimum, the Pope could be required to testify. And that would be a problem. It'd imply that the Church is subject to international courts, which themselves are legally dubious, as well as freighted with ideological goals.

The Pope probably made the right decision. He's gonna get out of Dodge.

(Full disclosure: I am probably best described as an agnostic, and have never been a card-carrying Catholic.)

Bugs, you have confused homosexuallty with pedophelia. They are totally unrelated.

Homosexuals use the term 'pedophilia' to dissociate themselves from a part of the homosexual community.

Pedophilia is actual a medical diagnosis. It's defined as a adult's sexual attraction for children. There is homosexual and heterosexual pedophelia. There is a surprising amount of heterosexual pedophilia amongst women, but it is culturally invisible.

One of the characteristics of pedophilia is that the pedophile is repulsed when the child enters puberty. And that's precisely the point at which young boys, certainly, attract a lot of male homosexual desire. I don't know about girls, but I have a friend whose mother was a pedophile. She bathed him, sometimes twice a day, and fondled him, took him into her bed and all of that. He thought, for years, that it was normal.

What really damaged him was that, as he matured, he found his mother physically repulsed by him. Almost violently so. He is now a mental hospital outpatient, taking medication to calm him. He can't handle his emotion.

As an aside, his mother stalks him to this day, and harasses him. She sends present to him on his birthday, Christmas, etc. and the 'gifts' are always refuse, almost garbage. She phones his doctors and psychiatrists to tell them 'secrets' about him. She has also phoned employers, and got him fired.

When he caught her at his door, he called the police, and claimed he was being stalked. The police laughed at him -- you can't be stalked by a woman, first of all, let along your mother. That's the police's real attitude. So he kept a journal for two years, noting sightings, and phone calls, etc. He took this to police, who actually checked it out with some of the professionals he deals with -- doctors mostly, but also social workers and a dentist. They confirmed his story, but the police did nothing.

The problem is, when you are a mental patient, you lose your civil and human rights, de facto. There's a lot of denial.

But this is different. I don't doubt that there are homosexual and heterosexual pedophiles in the church. But those people are pariahs, and don't receive the protection of the state, normally. The police treat minors in much the same way as they treat complaints from mental patients.

Is the RC Church protecting those people, or itself? I don't know, and probably both motives are at work.

But what is happening in our schools, and in the culture, is that homosexuality is being accommodated and encouraged. Not pedophilia. But pedophilia, overall, is a small phenomenon, compared to homosexuality.

I have a lot of sympathy for the present Pope, because what could he do, as a practical matter? In most parts of the world, it isn't easy to get priests, for one thing. He has to protect the institutional reputation of the Catholic church -- they provide a lot of services to young people, in schools, hospitals, and orphanages.

The Protestant churches have largely turned their services over to the state, so they don't have such a big problem. Additionally, they allow their priests to be married.

However, I will stand by what I said about the cultural confusion our culture is in about homosexuality.

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